Is it ethical to eat meat? The NY Times wants to know

My colleague Doris who blogs about Animal Rights has alerted me to a NY Times essay contest which is challenging meat eaters to convince their resident ethicist that there's nothing inherently wrong about eating meat.

Doris points out that the very nature of the need to search for a convincing argument shows that meat-eaters are grasping at straws ethically. I'm sure the NY Times (and perhaps this blog post) will be bombarded with wisecrackers saying the something like "Meat tastes good!" but while that may be an aesthetic argument in favor of meat eating (one which I happen to disagree with!), it's by no means an ethical argument. So far, many of the commenters seem to dismiss the issue saying it's not an ethical matter. Interesting.

On the contrary, there are numerous reasons not to eat meat. Princeton ethicist Peter Singer's 1975 book Animal Liberation is a good place to start, if you're interested in ethics. It was a seminal force launching the animal rights movement, and, as a college student, it had a profound impact on me personally. On a slightly unrelated note, I also highly recommend his 2009 title, The Life You Can Save (a great review is also online here).

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